It's been quite a while since I've written anything here, maybe a couple of years. Some may remember me, Seeker4, from the old H2O, or the early years of this one. I was a JW for about 35 years, MS, elder for about 15, pioneer, all of it. Very active.
I left the Witnesses about 10 years ago, prompted by the change in the teaching on the 1914 generation, and posted several hundred times here online. It was a great help getting things out and finding people dealing with the same Watchtower Society and Bible issues that I was. My life has gone on, very, very happily, I might add, though I stay somewhat connected to the Witnesses as my wife, mother and daughter are all still active.
Yesterday I was at my mother's house, and she said there was this Witness that wanted to talk with me about some issues from when I was still an active elder. This Brother was having problems with an elder I know well, and he felt the elder was abusing his authority, was tyrannical and domineering, constantly tried to pry into everyone's private life, and always felt that he was right. I'm sure that was all pretty much true - the elder has been that way for the over 40 years I've known him, and certainly is that kind of an elder. I've heard similar, not-so-flattering definitions of him many times from many different friends over the years.
I agreed, somewhat reluctantly, to talk with the Brother. It was one of the few times in the last five years that I've had any kind of a conversation like this with an active Witness. The last time was when a former Circuit Overseer came to see me, one who is now off the road but serving as a congregation elder, and who essentially agreed with what I felt about the Society and the Witnesses. He'd just decided to stay because he saw so many people who needed help. I wrote about that conversation, and the thread has actually been resurrected a couple of times over the past few years, and might still be in the archives somewhere if anyone is interested.
At any rate, yesterday I ended up talking with this Brother for a couple of hours, with my Mom, the JW, present, along with my sister, who is not a Witness but is quite familiar with them. At the end of the conversation, I was just so thankful that I had gotten out of the Organization. The conversation had been a huge reminder to me of all the things that had driven me away from being a JW.
For example, the very reason he came to see me - dissension among a group of people who are often far too involved in one another's lives. The WTS set the example itself for most of its history - tell people what to wear, how to groom themselves, who to marry, how much education to get, what employment to have, what medical treatment is permissable, what kind of sex to have with your mate, what songs to listen to and play, what movies to watch and on and on. That bleeds over into the body of elders feeling that all of these areas are OK for them to question and counsel the friends on, whether that is asked for or not. But some may say, as did this Brother yesterday, that all of this is in the Bible, not coming from the WTS. Well, there has been a huge amount of interpretation and opinion by the Society and the elders in all of these areas, just ask any brother who wanted to have a moustache or longer hair in the 60s or 70s, or a beard even til today. Like any high control group, the Witnesses have to feel it is OK to delve into all of these areas of the member's lives. It is a part of how control is kept.
It has been wonderful for the past decade not to feel that, as an elder, I had some sort of responsibility to get involved in telling other people how to live their lives, or to have to listen to the complaints about the elders that go overboard with that.
I also saw what a classic case this was. The Brother who wanted to talk to me has been a baptized Witness for over 40 years, but never served as an elder or MS, by his own admission, because he was too outspoken and wouldn't let the elders cover over stuff. How many brothers like that have you met over the years? Lots. And now here he was in another congregation, dealing with another domineering elder. I told him that I'd seen this same thing over and over through all the decades I'd been a Witness, and it was obvious the situation was still the same. I told him he was very unlikely to be able to do anything about the problem elder, and that it was much more likely that he was going to end up being disfellowshipped himself for causing problems. He said that could never happen, because he "was just telling the truth." I let him know that I was aware of a lot of people who'd been thrown out and were simply telling the truth. Doesn't do a lot of good when you don't have any power to go along with it!
Enough on that. Let me just quickly hit a few of the other things that happened in the course of the conversation that are just Witness responses that will eventually drive any thinking person out of the Organization.
"Jehovah is testing us." Or, "We're being tested by this," and Jehovah is just allowing it. Doesn't matter what awful thing it is, WTS mistakes, elder screwups, lying and slander in the congregation, etc., it's being allowed as a test for us. That argument fell flat for me years ago when I realized that if any father were to "test" his family in the way the Witnesses say Jehovah tests us, he'd be considered an abusive parent, if not a madman, and his family would be taken from him in a second!
The Society is just made up of imperfect humans, and they make mistakes. Absolutely true. And if it's true, then don't ever claim to be speaking for God. And trust me on this one, you can find a ton of examples where the WTS says it is doing just that, especially through the Governing Body.
Don't trust science. The Brother was classic on this, kind of repeating a jumble of two or three scientific mistakes and hoaxes from a century ago, and even getting those wrong to boot, and using that to say that all of science is inaccurate. I wouldn't say that all Witnesses are anti-science, but it's very much pick and choose with regard to science. The article by the JW who was a physicist earlier this year in the Awake! essentially made that point. Where science and the Bible disagree, he said he had to go with the Bible. Hmmm... not much of a scientest in my book.
Scientests are in cohoots to disprove the Bible. Sure, and they have that big, annual Let's All Lie About the Real Facts of Nature Convention. No scientest would want to assure his immortality by actually coming forward with the evidence being so carefully hidden that the Bible, and especially Genesis, is literally true. Sure!
Be numb as a fencepost when it comes to understanding even the most basic examples that prove Genesis cannot literally be true. I gave up after 10 minutes of trying to explain to this poor Brother that the ice core samples from all three major ice sheets on Earth go back at least 160,000 years, and that they prove conclusively that there has been rain and snow and not a tropical earth during all that time. They also prove that there was never an earthwide flood just over 4,000 years ago. This guy just shut down his brain, you could almost see it. He did the same with a couple of other examples - like when I told him about my seeing the fossilized stomach contents from a dinosaur, complete with the bones of the animals it ate, long before the flood, and long before any animals were allowed to eat each other,at least according to what Genesis says. Like millions of years before. That's when he started trying to tell me that there were dinosaurs after the flood, the only explanation that makes Biblical sense, but which is just sooooo not true.
You must be really smart. Ah, haven't I heard that one before. You're questioning, you're thinking, you say when things don't make sense. You must be smart and you know what that means, you're trusting in your own thinking and not in what the Bible or the WTS is telling you, and that's a huge mistake. The Witnesses, like all the fundamentalist groups, simply have to mistrust real intelligence and reasoning. It is a huge danger to them when someone from the crowd calls out, "The emperor has no clothes on!"
You shouldn't be mad at Jehovah. Come on, I don't think I was all that angry a Santa Claus when I found out he didn't exist. What silliness. But part of the mythology the Witnesses create that anyone who leaves must be stumbled by the brothers, angry at Jehovah, or prideful. It can never simply be because what the WTS teaches about the Bible simply makes no sense.
This is how Satan wants you to think. Satan wanted you to leave the JWs, and he's corrupted your mind. The wonderful thing when you take the mythologies literally - there's always some bigger thing out there, good or bad, to take all responsibility for what you think and do, and for working out your life. It was discovering that Satan is hardly ever mentioned in the Bible until about 4,000 years into it that was part of the reason I stopped believeing. Read the Genesis account carefully - NO mention of Satan anywhere. You've got to wait until the Greek scriptures 1000s of years later before someone informs you that the serpent in Eden was Satan. Real nice of Jehovah to leave out that little detail for his people for a few millenia, eh?? "You've got this hidden, incredibly powerful enemy, invisible to you, and he wants to turn you away from me and destroy you." Only God leaves that out for a long, long time. The Book of Job, you say? Still a few thousand years after Eden, biblically speaking, and if you believe that is a literal account of anything, than you also believe that people in those days spoke in their eqivalent of iambic pentameter poetry for days at a time. Surely you jest!
OK, I've ranted enough. But do you get the idea? This Brother thought he might help me to reconsider my leaving the Witnesses, when what he really did was show me all the reasons I left, and why I'm so happy not to have to live life denying what science and my own reason prove to me everyday. Or that I never again have to spend tons of time dealing with a dysfunctional congregation or body of elders.
Yahoo. Free at last.
S4